Modern day wireless communications employ various techniques to regulate interference in an attempt to achieve desired levels of coverage and throughput. One significant challenge is mitigating inter-cell-interference (ICI) in the uplink communications channel, where link adaptation and channel estimation tends to be more complex due to the shifting of uplink transmission points from one resource block (RB) to another.
One technique for mitigating ICI in the uplink channel is to coordinate uplink power control (PC) and scheduling decisions amongst neighboring base stations (eNBs). Generally speaking, uplink PC regulates the transmit power for signals propagated in the uplink channel, while uplink scheduling regulates the allocation of uplink time-frequency resources to candidate user equipments (UEs). Conventionally, uplink power control (PC) and scheduling may be coordinated in a centralized fashion by delegating PC/scheduling decisions to a centralized controller. Specifically, the centralized controller may dynamically perform joint power control (JPC) and/or joint scheduling (JS) using an exhaustive search approach, thereby generating a global PC/scheduling solution that (at least theoretically) achieves optimal coverage and throughput in the wireless network. However, this centralized approach to uplink PC and scheduling may consume relatively large amounts of network resources (e.g., bandwidth, processing, etc.), particularly in large networks that include many eNBs. In some instances, networks having limited resources to devote to PC/scheduling may find centralized PC/scheduling to be impractical or infeasible. As such, more efficient alternatives for effectively mitigating ICI in uplink communication channels are desired.